The Apothecary
For Franny
A note to the reader:
My memories of what happened to me in 1952, when I moved to London from Los Angeles with my parents and met Benjamin Burrows for the first time, aren’t perfect, for reasons I’ll explain in this book. I didn’t “forget” those months the way I sometimes forget where I left my glasses, or what was happening in the novel I put down last week, or the name of the woman who sells oranges at the farmers’ market. I lost what happened to me in the spring of 1952 in a much deeper, more profound way than that.
But I kept a diary that year, when I was fourteen and my life changed in such unforeseeable ways. The diary was taken from me, but later it was returned. When I read the entries, they were in my own handwriting, but they were as strange to me as if I had written them while asleep, about a dream that had vanished.
People describe their childhoods as magical, but mine—it really was. While I was complaining to my parents about having to leave Los Angeles, a chemist in China was narrowly escaping arrest, and a Hungarian physicist was perfecting the ability to freeze time. I was drawn, through Benjamin and his father, into the web of what they had created.
But if I tell you all this now, you won’t believe me. I’ll tell it in order, as I reconstructed the events after meeting Benjamin again. For a long time the memories seemed—however fantastic—to be important only to me personally. But lately it has seemed more and more urgent to tell this story now.
Jane Scott
LOS ANGELES, 2011
Contents
A note to the reader
CHAPTER 1: Followed
CHAPTER 2: The Apothecary
CHAPTER 3: St Beden’s School
CHAPTER 4: Spies
CHAPTER 5: Sherwood Forest
CHAPTER 6: His Excellency
CHAPTER 7: The Message
CHAPTER 8: The Pharmacopoeia
CHAPTER 9: The Physic Garden
CHAPTER 10: The Smell of Truth
CHAPTER 11: The Samovar
CHAPTER 12: The Return to the Garden
CHAPTER 13: The Gardener’s Letter
CHAPTER 14: Scotland Yard
CHAPTER 15: Turnbull Hall
CHAPTER 16: The Pickpocket
CHAPTER 17: Flight
CHAPTER 18: The Opera Game
CHAPTER 19: Invisible
CHAPTER 20: The Bunker
CHAPTER 21: The Oil of Mnemosyne
CHAPTER 22: The Pillar of Salt
CHAPTER 23: The Apothecary’s Plan
CHAPTER 24: The Dark Force
CHAPTER 25: Science Team
CHAPTER 26: At Lady Sarah’s
CHAPTER 27: The Port of London
CHAPTER 28: Breaking and Entering
CHAPTER 29: The Kong Olav
CHAPTER 30: The Anniken
CHAPTER 31: The Execution
CHAPTER 32: Genii
CHAPTER 33: Nova Zembla
CHAPTER 34: The Bomb
CHAPTER 35: The Frozen Sea
CHAPTER 36: Escape
CHAPTER 37: The Wine of Lethe
CHAPTER 38: The Guardians of Peace
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
Followed
I was seven and living in Los Angeles when Japan surrendered at the end of World War II, and my first vivid memories are of how happy and excited everyone was. My parents took me to a parade on Fairfax Avenue, where my father hoisted me onto his shoulders and sailors kissed girls in the streets. In school we made little paper flags to wave and learned that an evil force—two evil forces—had been defeated. We weren’t going to have wars anymore.
Some of my parents’ friends said it wasn’t true that we had ended war for all time.
“People said that about the last war,” they said, sitting on our back patio, surrounded by tall green hedges, drinking wine or lemonade, which is how I remember all of my parents’ friends from that time: the women with their hair up in French twists, the men with their ties undone, on the back patio with a drink in hand. “And look where we are.”
Others said that such terrible things had happened that the world would never be the same again. But my parents gave those friends hard looks when they knew I was listening.
My father said gasoline wasn’t going to be rationed anymore, and we could drive to Kings Canyon, which I imagined was populated with kings, to see the giant trees. My second-grade teacher said we would get real butter again, not white oleomargarine with the yellow colour capsule you could add to it. I didn’t remember real butter, and I liked the white oleo on toast with sprinkled sugar (my mother never added the yellow colouring because she hated fakery of all kinds), but I did believe that life was going to be better. We would have real butter, whatever that was like, and I might get a baby sister out of the deal. I would name her Lulu. The war was over and the bad guys had lost. A golden era had begun.
For a while, it actually seemed true. I never got a baby sister, but I